Don’t Stand By: EIFA Holocaust Memorial Event
Thursday 28 January, 7pm,
FFirhillHigh School
This event is sold out – to be placed on the waiting list please email info@eifa.org.uk
Edinburgh Inter Faith Association and Firrhill High School HMD Committee are delighted to invite you to an evening of remembrance for the victims of holocaust and genocide the world over.

The programme will include testimonies from Zigi Shipper, who survived the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau camp; human rights advocate Mukesh Kapila who has worked with survivors of the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur; and prayers led by Rabbi Stephen Fuchs.

The event programme will start at 7pm, arrive early for a guided tour of the Anne Frank exhibition.
There will also be music, poetry, candle-lighting by pupils of the school and a break for some refreshments. Bring along a pair of shoes you no longer need to add to an installation, these will be donated to Oxfam after the event.
The address of the school is 9 Oxgangs Road N., Edinburgh, EH14 1DP: MAP
This is a free event, generously supported by the Claremont Trust.
This event is sold out – to be placed on the waiting list please email info@eifa.org.uk
Find out more with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and The Holocaust Education Trust
JSoc Holocaust Memorial Erev Shabbat,
an Intercommunal Service, Meal and Talk
Friday 29 January, 7pm,
at the Chaplaincy Centre

Queen Margaret University and the University of Edinburgh welcome Rabbi Stephen Fuchs,
former President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism
and author of What’s In It for Me? Finding Ourselves in Biblical Narratives
to our JSoc Holocaust Memorial Erev Shabbat, an intercommunal service and talk in association with the Chaplaincy. Pot luck bring a veggie dish for a buffet between the service and the talk.

For those of you who can’t make Friday evening – or who want more of Rabbi Fuchs – the Rabbi will be leading Sukkat Shalom’s Shabbat morning service at the Columcille Centre, 2 Newbattle Terrace, EH10 4RT. The service will be followed by Kiddush and a presentation from the Rabbi.

At 5.30pm, Rabbi Stephen Fuchs will speak about his new book What’s in it for Me: Finding Ourselves in Biblical Narratives

The world is rapidly dividing between those who take biblical narratives as the literal word of God—claiming that they are historically and scientifically true—and those who dismiss those narratives as quaint or even foolish fairy tales. There is however a sacred middle ground that What’s in It For Me? Finding Ourselves in Biblical Narratives invites the reader to discover. The “truth” of these stories has nothing to do with “Did this really happen?” Their truth emerges in the valuable lessons these stories can teach all of us. There will be a book signing after the talk.

A buffet will be provided between 7pm and 8pm
At 8pm, Phil Alexander will give a musically illustrated talk entitled My Lover, My Murderer’s Daughter: Berlin and the politics of klezmer music.

Over the last twenty-five years, Berlin has played host to Europe’s most dynamic klezmer and Yiddish music scene. These days, the city’s scene attracts a vibrant blend of musicians from around the world, part of a complex and international conversation which takes in rupture and renewal, tradition and innovation, history and modernity. The talk will explore this ongoing journey of Berlin klezmer and the challenges of making the traditional strains of Jewish folk music relevant to a twenty-first century capital city.

Phil Alexander is currently completing his PhD at SOAS, University of London, focusing on contemporary klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin. As a musician he is the driving force behind Edinburgh-based Moishe’s Bagel, and a long-term musical partner of Eliza Carthy, Salsa Celtica and Mr McFall’s Chamber.

Free for EJLS members, £5 non-members for the whole evening and £3 for non-members who attend only one session.

There are also numerous external events and opportunities – fancy a summer in Ghana with Tzedek? Or the March of the Living in Poland – heavily subsidised by UJS? Or the UJS Liberation Conference? See last week’s email for more details, or click on the links.
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It is easy to overlook a gem of a lesson that lurks unobtrusively behind the Ten Commandments, but it is a lesson that can change our lives.

“And if you make Me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of cut stones; for if you lift up your tool upon it, you have polluted it.” (Exodus 20:22)

God loves us just as we are

We all have the potential to be stones in God’s altar and we all have the potential to see in others the same potential.

But too often we want to cut those other potential stones to fit our expectations of how they should be.

God welcomes all to worship at the Divine altar whether we are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, another religion or no religion at all. It does not matter if we are gay, straight or transgender.

To be part of God’s altar we need just one characteristic: a desire to use the talents with which the Eternal One has blessed us to make the world a better place.

One of the most precious gifts my mother gave me as a child was a phonograph record called, “Little Songs on Big Subjects.” One of my favorites begins, “I’m proud to be me, but I also see, you’re just as proud to be you. It’s just human nature so why should I hate you for being as human as I. We’ll give as we give if we live and let live, and we’ll both get along if we try …”

The idea that God wants us to accept people as they are is easy to overlook behind the Ten Commandments, but it is as important as any lesson we can ever learn.

I now shop at CVS not Walgreens. Walgreens’ is closer, and they don’t make mistakes with my prescriptions as CVS sometimes does. Walgreens’ parking is free and convenient. CVS has a pay lot and is a pain in the ass.

But Walgreens sells cigarettes, and CVS courageously has opted not to. I support that decision.

Why?

At last count cigarette smoking causes more than 480,000 premature deaths in the United States each year—about 1 in every 5 U.S. deaths—and an additional 16 million people suffer with a serious illness caused by smoking. I prefer not to patronize a pharmacy that sells such a lethal drug.

The Price of Principle!

I used to shop at Whole Foods. I have spent thousands of dollars there over the years. I love the abundance of organic and healthy products. Yes they are rightly called, “Whole Paycheck,” but it was worth it to me.

There are two very convenient Whole Foods store near my home, and it was very convenient. I don’t shop there anymore.

Why?

The CEO John Mackey is an active supporter of so-called spiritual guru Marc Gafni. Gafni has a long rap sheet as a sexual predator. Some of his activity is criminal because it involved underage girls. He should be in jail, not giving lectures to anyone about anything.

I cannot support a store that has as its head a person who so actively supports a sexual predator. Mackey says, it’s his private decision, and it has nothing to do with the company.

No Mr. Mackey it’s not.You are the company.

But if you claim it is a private decision, then how I spend my food dollars is my private decision too.

Fortunately thousands agree with me that it does. And have signed petition asking Mr. Mackey to disassociate completely from Gafni. I hope Mr. Mackey and Whole Foods get the message. I would like to shop there again when and if they do.

For now, I am getting used to shopping elsewhere.

The price of principle!

I don’t pretend that my decisions will hurt either Walgreen’s or Whole Foods. But what we do with our dollars makes us either part of the problem or part of the solution. I prefer to be part of the solution even if it is inconvenient.

“No, your highness,’ the man answered. “I came to invite you for a ride in my boat.”

Surprised, the king agreed.

After rowing out to the middle of the lake, the man began to chip a hole in the bottom of the boat.

“Stop” cried the King. “I’ll drown.”

“That’s not my problem,” the man answered. “That’s your problem. I am just making the hole under my own seat.”

“I understand now,” said the king.” I have learned my lesson. They rowed back to shore, and the king levied fairer taxes. (Adapted from Va-yikrah Rabbah 4:6)

This ancient Midrash reminds us that we are all passengers on this boat we call earth. There is no such thing as, “a hole only under my own seat.”

Today, the world has become very small. We will either find ways to live together in peace, to protect our precious environment, feed the hungry and provide warmth and shelter for all of God’s children, or the swirling maelstrom will engulf us all.

With all my heart I believe God chooses specific individuals for specific tasks.

I believe God chose Abraham to begin the journey that created the Jewish people. I believe God chose Moses to lead us out of Egypt. I believe God chose William Harvey to teach humanity about the circulation of blood, and I believe God chose the Wright brothers to inaugurate the era of aviation. I believe God chose Abraham Lincoln to end slavery in this country, and I believe God chose Martin Luther King to make the dream of racial equality more of a reality in our society.

If individuals can have destinies, why not peoples as a whole?

Just as God chooses individuals for certain tasks, so too does God choose peoples Milton R. Konvitz, the late Professor of Labor Relations at Cornell, noted in his famous essay, Many are Called And Many are Chosen,: God chose the ancient Greeks to bring the world an unprecedented sense of beauty, and God chose the Romans to teach the world new ideas about order.

God chose us Jews too.

God chose us, as Thomas Cahill teaches in his best selling book of several years ago Gifts of the Jews, to give the world a sense of the sanctity of time. Before we came along, Cahill notes, people perceived life as a series of repeating cyclical events.

“The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world…” Cahill’s book affirms the concept of chosenness. It invites us to take pride in the role our people play in history. It is good that a gentile wrote the book because it might seem too prideful if one of us had.

Nearly three thousand years ago the Prophet Amos taught that we are not better than others and proclaimed: “I have known you uniquely among the peoples of the earth. Therefore I will hold you accountable for every one of your transgressions (Amos 3:2)”

To be chosen does not mean we consider ourselves better than anyone else. It means to see ourselves chosen to repair our broken world.

Still, many Jews, both famous and ordinary, shy away from the concept of chosenness because they fear anti-Semitic reactions. Do we really think we will mollify anti-Semites by disavowing our destiny as a people?

Let’s get over that.

Anti-Semitism is the responsibility of anti Semites, not us. Abandoning the idea that God has chosen us for the task of bringing the ideals based on Torah to the world will not stop either anti-Semites or anti-Semitism.

Jews do not hold exclusive rights to acts of goodness. God revealed Torah to us, the Midrash teaches, in the desert, so we would know that its ideals are open to everyone who wishes to embrace them. They are not the exclusive property of any one faith or people.

Still, Judaism has done much to civilize this world. It is no accident that Jews who represent less than ½ of one per cent of the worlds’ population have won more than 30% of the world’s Nobel Prizes.

No it is not an accident. It is the product of a religious and cultural system that has stressed learning and literacy as ways of serving God. It is the product of a religious and cultural system, which teaches us, “Lo Toochal l’iheetalaym. You must not remain indifferent (Deuteronomy 22:3)” to the suffering of another even if the other is our enemy. It is the product of a religious system that calls on us to be “L’or Goyim, a light to the nations( Isaiah 49:6)”.

Look at the violence that stalks our schools, our cities and our towns. Is it really time for us to turn away from a way of life that has done so much for humanity over the centuries? Is it time to be less particular in our Jewish practices and studies? Should we trade Jewish worship and practice for a generalized civil religion, which says, “just be a good person?”

I hope not.

Chosenness does not mean privilege, and chosenness does not mean exclusiveness. Still, there are people who want no part of it. We have often been the targets of enemies, and many have looked at our history and our suffering and said with Tevye the Dairyman, “God if this is what it means to be chosen, please, choose someone else.”

Chosenness is a choice, a challenge and an achievement.

Choosing to be chosen is to believe that God cares deeply about the choices we make. I pray we continue to choose—as individuals and as a people to bring the ideals of Torah to the constant attention of the world.

As the next presidential election approaches, I face a serious dilemma.

Many of Bernie Sanders’ positions resonate with me, but I am loath to vote for him because—and I say this with trepidation—I consider him a self-hating Jew.

I know that is a serious charge, one I have thought long and hard about before taking public.

Now, I believe in freedom of religion, and I know there are many wonderful people who are—as Sanders claims to be–non-observant Jews. But there is a difference between “non-observance” and what we call in Hebrew zilzul, “public contempt” on the other.

When on the Eve of Rosh Hashanah, the sacred day of the Jewish New Year, Bernie Sanders spurns an invitation to speak in a synagogue for a regular political rally, that is zilzul!

When Bernie Sanders chooses to spend the morning of Rosh Hashanah not addressing any of the hundreds of throngs of synagogue crowds that would have loved to hear him but to speak at the fundamentalist Christian bastion, Liberty University, that is a gesture of Jewish self-abnegation that I find odious.

As a rabbi, I cannot deny I would be happy to see a Jew in the White House (although I will never vote for any candidate whom I do not think is the best candidate because he or she is Jewish).

But as a rabbi, I cannot support Bernie Sanders because he shows the world downright contempt for the precious heritage from which spring the social values that he espouses.

Public displays of Mr. Sanders’ self-hatred as a Jew are not new. Go back to 1988 and watch the long video below of him expressing his unqualified and enthusiastic support of Jesse Jackson for president.

After Rev. Jackson called New York City “Hymietown,” I believed then, and I believe now that only a self-hating Jew could endorse his candidacy for the White House.

But it gets worse

Asked at about 19:40 on the video, if there is anything Mr. Sanders did not like about Jesse Jackson, Mr. Sanders responded with yet another long encomium. Only when pressed (at 21:35) does Mr. Sanders—with visible reluctance–acknowledge that Rev. Jackson’s “Hymietown” comment was “an unacceptable statement.”

As an American, I take seriously my right— and what I believe is my obligation—to vote. So if I stand in the booth on Election Day and Bernie Sanders is the least undesirable choice before me, I will vote for him. Bu if I do so, it will be with the same reluctance with which Mr. Sanders called “Hymietown,” ”an unacceptable statement.”

In this week’s Torah portion God’s war against Egypt reaches its dreadful climax with the death of every firstborn Egyptian son. (Exodus 12:29).

The story compels us to ask:What about “collateral damage, the innocent who suffer?

Each year more Jews celebrate our liberation from Egypt than participate in any other religious event during the year. One of the most important moments in the Passover ritual is when we dip our finger ten times into our wine cups and stain our plates with the ten drops.

Wine in Judaism represents joy (NEVER blood).

By taking these drops out of our cup we consciously diminish our joy to acknowledge and lament the horrible suffering of the Egyptians.

When Israel repelled the terrorist uprisings in Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014, strong voices questioned her actions. It was not only the anti-Semites who wish to see Israel wiped off the map. There were and are thoughtful voices—both in Israel and the world outside—who love and support the Jewish state that decry the huge number of innocent people–particularly children–who suffer and die by her hand.

We cannot turn a deaf ear to the cries of our enemy!

For a civilized people self-defense and the pursuit of peace must always be inseparable. May this truth impel us to relentlessly work for the day when, “Violence shall no more be heard in your land (Isaiah 60:18)!”

When we celebrate our liberation from Egypt in ancient days and our survival as a people in a tiny land of our own today, may we never forget:

The tears of our enemies stain our souls, and God holds us accountable for them.

May the tears of all God’s children soon become the solvent that dissolves hatred and war wherever it exists!